Is the Age of Posting Over?

Anne Helen Petersen (0:00)

Hey, everyone, we need your questions for two episodes we're working on. One is on workplace communication. So have you noticed that it's devolving? Are there quirks or trends you don't understand? Why are people sending a Slack and also a text message and also calling you on the phone? What are you seeing? Let's talk about it. And the other is on journal influencers. These are social media personalities that are also delivering news. Sometimes they have formal training. Most often, they do not. What are you noticing or what are you curious about there? We could talk about like, these are people who oftentimes are like reporting from outside of trials or like reads AP headlines. What are you noticing or what are you curious about there? If there's a specific person doing this work that you want to still like look at closely, you can also tell us that too.

Submit all your questions at tinyurl.com/culturestudypod.

All right, thanks and on to today's show.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton (1:01)

Everyone has private feelings about each other's posts. And that's something too that I found, like, talking to people about their friends, your friends. And they pull up their phone and show me like, well, this is like my friend, look what she does. Like, look at what is this? And I mean, it's amazing because you can't talk about it with a friend. This is one of the things that we don't talk about with our friends. You can't be like, how come you wrote that like weird poem to your husband on your anniversary?

Like, but he doesn't even use social media. So like, who's going to read it? Like, who was that for?

Anne Helen Petersen (1:39)

This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Petersen.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton (1:42)

And I'm Kathryn Jezer-Morton. I'm the author of The Story of Your Life, How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. And I write the brooding column for The Cut.

Anne Helen Petersen (1:52)

In the introduction to your book, you write that social media is, quote, a world historically essential archive of our recent history. This is both a very obvious, uncontroversial position and an uncomfortable one.

So I want to start with that because I love that you point out the, like, yeah, everyone's like, duh, this is where we put our stuff. But also it makes people feel weird that that's the case. So could you talk a little bit about that discomfort?

Kathryn Jezer-Morton (2:20)

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's where we put all our stuff. There's, you know, some people are making, you know, physical photo albums, that's great. But, like, our day-to-day is kind of being processed through it.

And I don't think that people like to talk about the deliberate choices that they're making when they're creating content. I think they like it to seem like it's this kind of natural expression of self that just, like, flows authentically from within. Everyone that I've ever spoken to about this is, like, they insist that they are authentic.

On some level, right? And also, but, like, none of us are, I mean, authenticity is a very slippery concept, but, like, we're all doing, you know, a version of something, and that's just what we're doing. And I think that, yeah, it just makes people uncomfortable to think that your archive is this place where you're maybe not even fully in control of, like, what it is that you're doing and how you're acting, because you're trying to do a lot of things. You have a lot of ulterior motives in how you're telling your story.

Anne Helen Petersen (3:25)

Yeah. Thinking about it as an archive is so interesting. And the more interesting thing to me really is someone's...

I want to get in their phone, right? And look at the contrast between what's in the phone and what was posted on social media. And this, we'll talk more about our common work and our PhD work. But when I was doing my PhD, one of my favorite pieces that I ever wrote was looking at how star archives function and the difference between an archive for a Hollywood star who knew that they were going to donate their archive and thus curated their archive in a very particular way to send a particular message about who they were and then contrast with people who weren't necessarily thinking about that.

They knew maybe I'm a star, I'm famous, someone's going to do something, but they weren't sorting through their papers to donate them. Right. But even just the idea that our archive, whatever is left behind of us, the things that we keep on purpose or that we post on purpose, we're trying to say something about ourselves and no one wants to admit that. Right? They're like, it's just me.